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Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

It was a USB drive and one day when plugged in it showed up as unpartitioned. I pulled the drive out of its case and plugged it straight to the motherboard and still the same problem. Testdisk was able to see all the files, so I put the drive away until I had another drive large enough to transfer all the data.

I now have a USB drive large enough so I decided to do the recovery. I plugged the drive in and windows could see the partition. Straight away I tried copying all the files to the new drive using Total Commander, but the copy slowed to a crawl and brought the whole machine to it knees. Same thing when trying with TestDisk.

I decided to put the drive into a linux machine and use ddrescue to dump an image of the drive onto the USB disk using:

ddrescue -n /dev/sdc1 /mnt/tmp/recover/ddrescue.img rescue.log

ddrescue manged to rip through the first 8GiB and then crawled to a halt and spent the next 11hrs to do another 48MiB with an average speed of ~3900 B/s and an estimation of 32 years to finish.

I've stopped ddrescue and hope that someone can help me out with some advice on how to proceed from here.